Stuff 'n junk

I've been doing some data transfer work for a paralegal firm since last week, performed a BIOS upgrade on that beast of a Photoshop machine I built a few months back (seemed to be having some stability issues, and a new BIOS release claims to address those), and am suspecting a memory leak on the server at work... We're running Windows SBS 2003 with 4GB of RAM, and the "commit charge" starts around 3.5GB (which makes sense, given the running processes), but has been known to climb to over 5GB for no readily apparent reason and stay there until a restart. I just updated our database and mail software, so hopefully that helps.

My main PC is freezing either at POST or during Vista's startup sequence again... It's different than the last time though (happening at different points, seemingly more randomly). I'm currently suspecting something with the hard drive, so I'm gonna do a bit of hardware shuffling when I get a few hours to spare. I'm going to take the 80GB SATA drive from my Athlon 3200+ machine and make it the system drive in my 3.6GHz Pentium 4 machine. The current 320GB SATA2 drive in the P4 will go from two partitions (80GB for the system, the rest for data) to one big data drive, and the Athlon will get a 160GB IDE drive (currently unused) to go along with the 80GB IDE drive that'll be left in there.

I haven't taken much time to really sit down with any games lately, but I've finished the Alien campaign and am making my way through the Predator campaign in Alien Versus Predator on Jaguar. While I still feel that many aspects of the game are pretty dated, I'm uncovering more and more really good design ideas in there. I'm trying to remember if any of those unique facets of the gameplay returned for the two PC sequels... But I might have to dig them out and install them again to find out for sure. Each race plays a fundamentally different game in the Jaguar title, and not simply because they follow separate storylines or have varied arsenals. I'll write more once I've finished the game.

Once AvP is out of the way though, I'm not sure what to get into next... I think I've narrowed it down to Rayman on Jaguar; Jak 3 (really bored of it, but I've come so far that it'd be a shame to leave it unfinished), Yakuza 2, or God Of War II on PS2; Farenheit on PC; or Metroid Prime 2 on GameCube. Then again, I'd also really like to get going on Beyond Oasis (been a long time since I finished it) or Landstalker on Genesis and then their respective sequels, Legend Of Oasis (never quite finished it) or Dark Savior on Saturn.